Inventages announces that one of its portfolio companies, Cognoptix, has demonstrated unprecedented accuracy in detecting Alzheimer’s disease. A multi-site clinical trial of the SAPPHIRE II eye test showed a sensitivity of 85% and a specificity of 95% in differentiating Alzheimer’s disease patients from healthy volunteers.

Caris Life Sciences recently announced data from two studies presented at the 2013 European Cancer Congress (ECC 2013), which demonstrate the potential of evidence-guided molecular profiling to improve the treatment of patients with hard-to-treat cancers, including cancers of unknown primary (CUP) origins as well as rare tumors and cancers that have been refractory to treatment.

At the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain, Sanofi (EURONEXT : SAN and NYSE : SNY) recently presented the innovative blood glucose meter MyStar Extra®, the first self-monitoring device that provides robust estimates of the A1c value, a key indicator for long-term glucose control.[3],[4] The hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) assay has become the cornerstone for the assessment of diabetes control and A1c test results are widely used to guide treatment decisions.[5],[6] Especially convenient for people starting on insulin or using insulin, MyStar Extra® is a supportive meter, designed to help people with diabetes be engaged in their insulin management and treatment plan.[7],[8],[9]

A comparison of three methods of predicting the risk of recurrence in women treated for estrogen-receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer finds that only the breast cancer index (BCI) – a biomarker based on the expression levels of seven tumor-specific genes – accurately identifies patients who continue to be at risk after five years of treatment with either tamoxifen or the aromatase inhibitor anastrozole. The study comparing the BCI with two other prognostic tests has been published online in Lancet Oncology.

Rancho BioSciences, the leading manual data curation company for genomic and clinical data recently announced that they will partner with OmicSoft, an industry leading provider of enterprise solutions for next-generation sequencing and Omics data analysis, management, and visualization. Rancho BioSciences and OmicSoft will collaborate on customer driven projects to curate data in order to make it analysis ready, leveraging Rancho BioSciences global team of PhD and MD curators and OmicSoft tools and databases for biomarker data management, visualization, and analysis. OmicSoft software is powerful but easy to use, allowing the bench scientist, bioinformatician and statistician to all benefit from the same tools.